What Spirituality Means to Me

I remember the first time I entered a church, I was six years old and it wasn’t even the church of my family’s denomination. My parents placed me at a catholic school as a kid because I got jealous that my autistic brother got to go to school before I did, mind you I was only four at that time. I believe it was Ash Wednesday when I first went; I didn’t know what it meant or what it stood for. So as the curious kid as I was, and still am, I asked my first grade teacher what we were doing. Of course she didn’t give me a clear answer and I still don’t really know what it is to this day, in which I do plead ignorance in the sense that I don’t really know much about Catholicism. It also didn’t help that I grew up in a family of mixed denominations. My dad was raised Episcopal and my mom was raised Southern Baptist.  I don’t really know what my parents wanted for me as far as religious beliefs went, so it really made things confusing growing up. When I was nine, my mom took me to church with my adopted grandfather. This church was a Protestant church if memory serves correctly, and I was put into a Sunday school class with children my age. In this class that one Sunday they were talking about Jesus and how he did good deeds for others he didn’t even know. Because I was the “new kid” in class, I was called on a lot more than the other children. One thing out of my curiosity I asked, “How do we know Jesus really did those things?” I was told by the teacher that the Bible says so. I was nine and didn’t want to accept that answer. I left the room to look for my mom and when I did, I asked her if we could leave and to not take me back to that church again. Then the move to Idaho happened and I was exposed to another type of religion, Mormonism, which I still don’t have a lot of knowledge of and most of what I know is lies my parents told me about it. My first exposure to it was when I asked a girl to come to my house for dinner because she was a good friend, she asked her parents and they told her that she could go because it sounded like a date rather than having a friend over for dinner. I asked her why and it was because she couldn’t date until she was sixteen, in which this made no sense to me at all because I didn’t ask her out on a date. The next time I went to church I was twelve, and it was for a youth group and the local church college Northwest Nazarene University. I went with some good friends I had at the time and had a great time there. Although stirring inside of me were feelings that didn’t make sense. It was like the thinking was being done for me and not my own. After my best friend at the time moved away, I stopped going for years. And through those years I was trying to come to terms with what I been taught in religion with my sexuality, which was very difficult to do for someone aged thirteen through eighteen. I started going to church again when I entered college with some friends I had made in the dormitories. This church was an interesting one, something I had never experienced before. Songs about God and Jesus by religious singers and groups like Casting Crowns, then a sermon, and finally an encore performance. I’m not friends with some of these people anymore because of either my sexuality or because I question religion in its entirety. I stopped going to church at nineteen and haven’t been back since because my views don’t mesh well with some of their views, especially when it came down to my sexuality and who I am as a person. 

This isn’t about Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, Mormons, or what it is about them I do and don’t like. This is about what Spirituality means to me and also what Agnostic means to me as well because I belong in both camps, but they are both situational in my views and I’m not going to claim that I’m right or wrong, this is just purely explanatory for my belief system that works for myself.

Spirituality is different for everyone. It is high meaningful to say that it is a broad spectrum of beliefs rather than a static view. Of course my idea of Spirituality is going on a long run and thinking about life decisions that must be made or even just meditating on my own or in yoga class. My belief in Heaven is that there is one and we all go there regardless of what we did on Earth and my belief is that Hell doesn’t exist because we are currently experiencing it in our waking life. Hell is said to be a place of fire and brimstone, a place where those who sinned go to experience unimaginable pain and discomfort. Earth, I believe is our Hell, there is no Satan or demons; there is experience of pain and discomfort at unimaginable levels. If Jesus did die for our sins than why is it that we cannot sin freely without being told we are going to Hell? The answer I have arrived at for myself is that humans are going to be sinners; no matter how hard we try we are never going to be perfect, therefore we always sin and we’d all be going to Hell anyway. I can’t honestly say that, and this one is overused, that I’m going to Hell just because I’m gay. This is where my belief in God comes into the picture. I believe that God can possibly be a man or a woman, we don’t really know for sure and since watching “Joan of Arcadia” I hold this belief that if you believe God is a man then that is your view, and same goes for if you believe God is a woman. He/She has set a path for us to follow and gives us a choice on such a path. He/She also creates us in the beginning of our life here on Earth. Suffice to say I was born gay and is not a choice because I have something to learn as a gay man that someone didn’t learn at all for whatever reason it may be. My soul is of God’s essence, just like everybody else’s. When we do die we become a part of He/She, with no judgment aside from whether we return to Earth or not, which this idea is called reincarnation, only I don’t believe we become a plant or animal when we learned our lesson. But this is what I personally believe. Another reason I’m not completely agnostic is that there are many things that can’t be explained objectively. An example is my friendship with my best friend. I was dating an incredibly abusive person at the start of this year and I actually met her in an undergraduate Practicum class and she saw that I was in constant sadness. She started hanging around me and eventually things blew up between this guy and I. I had a good talk with her about what to do, as well as another good friend of mine, and decided to break-up with him. She also noticed that I wasn’t eating that well and becoming anorexic and helped me get out of that hole I was in. If she didn’t come into my life I would’ve just starved myself into malnutrition. She has helped me in more ways than one. It is unsuspected friendships like hers that keep me believing in God.

Agnostism to me is when I am in the lab or when I’m making a decision for my life, which is in tie with my spirituality. When I am in the psychology labs I have to be objective and not let personal ideas get in my way. I think of it as my scientist-self. There is protocol to be followed and decisions have to be made in a non-personal manner. This idea is still fairly new to me, but when I do think about it a lot of questions do come to my mind. My main question is what kind of God puts someone on Earth that is homosexual and allows others to be ridiculed for who they are? That was something I asked myself during high school when I was being bullied for being different. It just didn’t seem fair at all. A great friend of mine and I were talking about this last night, is that the good gay men constantly get hurt, not just by patterns of hurt we all go through, but because people make the decision to hurt others for no reason other than that they are different and don’t fit into a mold.

Sure it gets confusing since I have a foot in one world and the other one in another. When it comes down to it, this works for me as a person and helps me work out what is going on in the world. This helps me create a world that is easier to understand and still be able to be a skeptic in a dangerous world such as ours. Even with being a gay male, I still have faith in what I believe to be true and no one can take that away from me. Because everyone’s ideas of religion, spirituality, and skepticism are different. Some are more different than night and day, and instead of causing an argument over who is right and who is wrong, we should try to understand our differences and learn from each other.